Good Habits for iOS

We are big fans of creating lists to keep us focused on our daily goals, so you can imagine our delight in coming across Good Habits, an iPhone app that lets you create and maintain daily reminders to ensure that your goals are being met. We love its simple design and motivational technique for turning our goals into daily habits.

Good Habits opens with a blank page to enter your daily reminders. To help you get started, an Information button offers a visual walkthrough of how to read the task once it's added. To add a task, first name your new habit, and then set the reminder. For testing purposes, we named our new habit "Yoga" and set the reminder for every day at 8 a.m. Each successful completion of a task creates a chain with the idea of not breaking it -- though you can pause and resume the chain without losing it. The makers of the app suggest that you create small, specific goals because you are more likely to stick with them and not break the chain. For example, instead of naming your new habit "Exercise," it's better to name it "20 Pushups," so you have something very specific to accomplish each and every day. At 8 a.m. the following day, we were reminded of our goal of daily yoga.

Is Good Habits going to make it easier to get out of bed at 6 a.m. to do 20 pushups? No. But it can at least help you clear out the clutter in your head to stay focused on your goals, and for that we recommend it.